Thomas P. M. Barnett

Thomas P.M. Barnett has worked in US national security circles since the end
of the Cold War, starting first with the Department of Navy's premier think
tank, the Center for Naval Analyses. From there he moved to serve as a
senior researcher and professor at the Naval War College in Newport RI,
where he became a top assistant to Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowksi - the
father of "network-centric warfare." After 9/11, Barnett served in
Cebrowski's Office of Force Transformation in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense as the Assistant for Strategic Futures. He developed a famous
PowerPoint brief on the subject of globalization and international security,
which later morphed into a New York Times-bestseling book, "The Pentagon's
New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century" (2004). Since leaving
government service in 2005, Dr. Barnett has amassed a number of duties in
the private sector: running his own consultancy, Barnett Consulting LLP;
serving as senior managing director to the technology firm, Enterra
Solutions LLC; acting as chief analyst for the online strategic community,
Wikistrat Ltd. (and editing their biweekly globalization report, the
"CoreGap Bulletin"); writing as contributing editor for Esquire magazine and
posting to its The Politics Blog; writing his own blog ("Thomas P.M.
Barnett's Globlogization") and a weekly column for World Politics Review
("The New Rules"); working as senior consultant to the political-risk firm,
Eurasia Group; and serving as Executive Vice President of the New York- and
Beijing-based Center for America-China Partnership. Barnett completed his
"Pentagon's New Map" trilogy with the volumes, "Blueprint for Action: A
Future Worth Creating" (2005), and "Great Powers: America and the World
After Bush" (2009). Dr. Barnett holds a PhD in political science from
Harvard University. He is based in Indianapolis, Indiana, and travels the
world giving speeches and conducting his strategy work with both private-
and public-sector enterprises.

Articles from Contributor

Cool NYT story on the US military’s use of biometrics (eye scans, etc.) to create unforgeable identification records of roughly one-in-five fighting-age Iraqi and Afghani males, creating databases that can be perused in seconds by a handheld device at a border crossing. Naturally, there is much interest and some desire to use the …

Wash Times piece on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen’s counterpart in China (Chen Bingde) saying that US naval ex’s in regional waters with local friends (Vietnam, Philippines, etc.) are “inappropriate.” Mullen replies that they’re not directed at China, which, of course, is the whitest of lies. The US sells …

Financial Times story last week (US urged to rethink export controls on drones) re: Paris Air Show cites multiple US defense corporate sources complaining that unless the US Government lifts some of the restrictions, the world’s “insatiable appetite” for drones will be exploited by other nations’ military-industrial complexes. The …

Economist story (6/18) about the recent wave of high-profile attacks by hacker collectives references “SQL injections,” or the technique of penetrating databases of companies, agencies, etc. McAfee, the web security firm, says about half of those it tracked over the first quarter of 2011 were made by Chinese “cyberspies” – a rather …

Hailing again from Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition (30 teams of grad students/interns from elite universities and think tanks around the world), where I serve as head judge (and I get paid), I wanted to share the decidedly provocative vision of Russia’s long-term future security paradigm as crafted by the New …

In my continuing role as Head Judge for the online strategy community Wikistrat‘s month-long International Grand Strategy Competition featuring roughly 30 teams from top-flight universities and think tanks around the world, I get to peruse all manner of provocative thought from some of tomorrow’s best and brightest thinkers. And …

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done a lot of good things over his tenure: he carved out a bureaucratic space for the small-wars crowd (Army, Marines, SOF) and he engineered the Navy-Air Force Full Employment Act (otherwise known as the AirSea Battle Concept) to keep the rest of the Building happy; he was tough enough …

As the Pentagon’s “efficiencies review” unfolds, one Cold War mainstay of the US military posture is inevitably going to be retired – namely, the land-based portion of the strategic missile triad. The Pentagon is tasked with coming up with $400 billion in savings over the next decade, and so this long-discussed option (and old Mark …

NYT story describing how Obama administration is funding all sorts of shadow networks to thwart government censorship overseas. I think this is fine. [Blank] ’em if they can’t take the Web – a Defense Department creation, BTW.

But understand this: we get all jacked about cyber warfare against our infrastructure (How dare people …